Yesterday, I was waiting for the train to arrive for my daily commute. After it pulled up to the station, a mother with a baby carriage tried to disembark. She struggled with the carriage while carrying a heavy bag, a second child pulling her arm. Naturally, I jumped in to help out and she was very grateful. I was able to help because I a) saw her struggling and b) was standing right beside her when she needed help. I was aware of the situation she was in and spontaneously collaborated with her to get her kids and stuff out of that train. But, how does this story relate with your agile team?
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Having started out on a Joyent appliance, migrating to Linode, and, finally, to Amazon with a Bitnami stack, we noticed the common pain of manually configuring each of these environments. Bitnami caused us an even bigger headache by being very difficult to update (apt-get doesn’t update the bitnami wrapped AMP stack). We decided to get full control of our box by setting up a stock Debian LAMP stack on AWS using Puppet and git to manage our sites. Here’s a gentle introduction on how we did it.
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Is your growth being stifled by your current company? Time to find a place where you can assume new responsibilities and pickup new technical skills.
If you have the feeling that you cannot grow in your current job, it’s time to move on. Staying put not only means getting sidelined and frustrated, but even worse, your technical skills will become crusty and outdated. Put the fun back into working and learning in an environment which challenges you and values your contribution.
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For nearly four years Dan and I have shared our experiences and ideas about agile development and DevOps.
We would like to ask you, our dear readers, how we could help you to become even more agile and have more fun doing your job.
Please help us to understand your needs better by taking our short survey at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MKYQPL5.
We’d love to hear from you!
Dan & Matthias
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Almost 9:30am. Time for our stand-up. What did I finish yesterday? What do I plan on finishing today? What’s stopping me?
The daily routine of the morning stand-up is so ingrained, I go through the above liturgy without conscious thought. For me, the stand-up provides a focused center for the team, our morning huddle. We look each other in the eyes, see how we’re feeling – we hear in each others’ voices strong commitment or uncertain hesitation. We lean on each other for support and promise ourselves that at the end of the day we will be one step closer to the goal.
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Self-organizing teams perform better than micro-managed ones. The ability to really make a difference motivates the team members and makes everyone contribute his best effort. But how can we create self-organizing teams when everyone is used to hierarchical command and control patterns?
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After DevOps Borat and BroOps it’s time for The DevOps Dudes!
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This is a guest post by Prasad Chaudhari, freelance java consultant. He was appointed as a project manager for the project mentioned below and played a role of ScrumMaster.
Locally, we have six scrum teams: five software development teams, and one IT operations team. Each team has a sprint backlog, scrum board and burn-down chart. Automated tests and continuous integration are part of the daily business.
Our company has a universal understanding and acceptance of the Lean and Agile Value Chain, beginning with rough user concepts and ending with customer delivery. Without this basic building block, as the theory of constraints suggests, there will either be many unfinished stories in progress (i.e., because operations cannot make regular releases), or developers will starve for stories (because the business is unable to prioritize).
Last year, we decided to grow our software development capability by adding another scrum team in India. After a few iterations, reflections and process adaptations, the remote team became productive. We’ve been successfully running agile offshore for over a year now, and I’d like to share our key learnings.
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The DevOps hype produces some strange effects. Not only do tool vendors try to jump on the DevOps band wagon by declaring their products “DevOps inside” or listing DevOps as a feature, but companies start to look for a “DevOp” in their job ads. Don’t be misled! Here’s what DevOps is really about:
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